The personal blog of Peter Lee a.k.a. "China Hand"... Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel, and an open book to those who read. You are welcome to contact China Matters at the address chinamatters --a-- prlee.org or follow me on twitter @chinahand.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

Saudi Arabia vs. Qatar, Redux

My post on the competing strategies of Saudi Arabia and
Qatar received a considerable amount of thoughtful comment and pushback by e-mail
and on the Web, more than I’m accustomed to receive for a non-China post from
somebody who has only an informed layman’s interest in the Middle East.

Maybe I came up with something worth thinking about.Well, even a blind hog finds a truffle every
once in a while.[see note below]

More to the point, I think my post contributed to a
crystallizing sense in the foreign policy realm that Saudi and Qatari differences
are probably central to what has become the nagging Syrian conundrum, namely,
why have the Western regimes, Turkey, and the Gulf Cooperation Council been
unable to club together and crater the Assad regime?

From the moral imperative side of the equation, consider
Libya.We interrupted Gaddafi in what
the midst of what was much less than a counterinsurgency and more of a police
action in pursuit of the armed rabble of eastern Libya.When the NATO no-fly zone was launched, only
two or three thousand people had died, about a quarter of them in Gaddafi’s
forces.At the time, correspondents in
Washington were given a bullsh*t backgrounder claiming that intervention was
required because of an impending massacre of up to 50,000 innocents in
Benghazi.Post-war, there has been an
embarrassing dearth of evidence concerning Gaddafi’s genocidal rage; Libya’s
Deputy Minister of Martyrs announced that the current count was 4700 rebel dead
and 2100 missing, something of a drop from the 2011 estimate of 25,000.

Contrast this with Syria.

No matter who does the counting, there are tens of thousands
dead in Syria, hundreds of thousands of IDPs and refugees shivering miserably
through the winter, and if there was ever a case for getting off one’s ass and
doing a humanitarian intervention, Syria is now it.

If the grim mechanics of regime subversion rather than
humanitarian intervention are one’s cup of tea, on the other hand, all the
elements are in place to implode the Assad regime: widespread popular dissatisfaction,
a collapsed economy, a weary army, international sanctions, covert financial
and material support of the rebels, an influx of hardened fighters, and safe
havens in Turkey.

Despite the solidarity of the ruling elite, support from
Iran, China, and Russia, and Assad’s bloody and successful obstinacy in
repressing his domestic opponents, after close to two years of the baleful
attention of Assad’s enemies in the West, the Gulf, and Turkey, Syria is a
basket case.

But nobody has stepped up to say (to paraphrase Nigel
Tufnel) Let’s turn it up to 11, pour in the money, arms, and fighters, maybe
set up a no-fly zone and erase Assad’s air assets, and end this thing.

Instead, the Syrian crisis lurches on, absent the external political
will to finish the job or shortcircuit the insurrection with a negotiated
transition.

Bernard at Moon of Alabama kindly excerpted my post and took
issue with it.He is of the opinion that
even the Saudis are losing their appetite for further butchery in Syria, and
Assad may be able to cut a deal to get the Saudis and everybody else off his
back (as he’s been trying to do for two years) and weather the storm.

I dunno.Bernard
knows a lot more about the Middle East than I do and his post is detailed and
quite persuasive.But…

I look at what the various players are saying (and not
saying) and doing (and not doing) as reported in the Western language press,
and I conclude the problem is that the get-Assad coalition can’t get on the
same page with Saudi Arabia or find a way to finesse a political settlement out
of the bloodbath.

Looking at the political calculus, I find it hard to believe
that the United States, after having spent over a year building up Assad as the latest
monster of the century, is willing to suffer the loss of face that is involved
in having him stay on as part of a deal.That, to me, is just not how the US operates.A key element of US foreign policy is the
idea of credibility and being perceived as a reliable ally, one that does not
stake out positions and then abandon them.US credibility took a hit in the Gulf countries thanks to the Obama
administration’s equivocal response to the Egyptian revolution (first trying to
bolster Mubarak and then pulling the plug), and from the plainly stated US
desire to pivot to Asia and its riches (and away from the Middle East and its
headaches).I don’t think the US is
going to get out in front of the anti-Assad coalition and insist on a
negotiated settlement.

Unless there is a united call from Turkey and the GCC, in
other words, to let bygones be bygones and work with Assad or through Assad’s
circle to end Syria’s misery, the US can’t moderate its Syria position until Assad
is driven out of Damascus.

Also, I’m afraid that the key foreign players are reaching
the conclusion that the Syrian toothpaste is pretty much out of the tube and a
negotiated settlement is just going to be Act I of years of chaos, violence,
and misery.Putting Humpty Dumpty together
again, in other words, is not a job for all the king’s horses and all the king’s
men.It’s a long-term project for Victor
Frankenstein, and nobody’s going to be very happy with the outcome.The overall feeling seems to be to let ‘er
drift (while occasionally berating the Russians and Chinese for not stepping in
to fix the mess) and turn to other concerns.

To my mind, Saudi Arabia has looked at this state of affairs
and decided that the best policy is one of obstinately supporting the
insurrection until Assad is driven out, no matter how protracted and nasty the
process is.

I think Saudi Arabia is reacting to the US abdication of
leadership to assert its own bloody-minded realist strategy for the Middle East
(and, in the process, discredit Qatar as amateur soft power enthusiasts without
the belly to do the dirty work needed to neutralize the Iranian challenge).

Perhaps Saudi Arabia is living the neo-con Clean
Break dream in reverse.Instead of
carrying the fight from Iraq to Syria, and then Iran, as Dick Cheney dreamed,
militant Islamists backed by Saudi Arabia (or powerful elements within Saudi
Arabia) are closing in on the overthrow of the Assad regime and creating the
social, political, and military conditions for an anti-Maliki insurrection in
Iraq’s Sunni heartland.

People whose memories of the Iraq debacle go back a few
years will not be too surprised to learn that Fallujah—the bloody and unbeaten
heart of the Sunni insurgency against the US occupation—is back in the news.

Thousands of mourners gathered in the Iraqi city of Fallujah
on Saturday at the funerals of Sunni protesters killed by army troops a day
earlier.

The funeral processions were followed by renewed protests
against Iraq's Shia-led government.

On Friday, five people were shot dead and dozens more were
wounded when the army opened fire on a protest.

…

The army had withdrawn from the city for the funerals,
fearing further violence.

But in an apparent revenge attack, gunmen killed two
soldiers and abducted three more on the outskirts of the city.

Sunni leaders in Anbar province, where Fallujah is located,
had earlier told the BBC that they would attack army positions in the province
if the government failed to bring the soldiers responsible for the protester
shootings "to justice".

One must, of course, insert the caveat that local Sunni elites displayed a visceral hostility to Saudi-backed AQ types by teaming with the United States during the famed "Anbar Awakening". However, it should also be remembered that before partnering with the Americans, local Sunnis had had originally teamed with foreign jihadis in order to stick it to a hostile central administration, a pattern that they might revert to in this situation.

SCMP ran a Reuters picture of the funeral procession that
gives an idea of the magnitude of the unrest in Fallujah.

In case one needs a reminder of how the whole cycle of
demonstration/repression/martyr/funeral rinse-and-repeat that drove the news
cycle in Syria two years ago, Al Jazeera reports:

At the protest, the
latest in a series of demonstrations against the government of Nouri al-Maliki,
the prime minister, shouts of "Listen Maliki, we are free people"
were followed by "Take your lesson from Bashar," a reference to
Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria.

Did I mention, by the way, that a suicide bomber killed 42 people in a Shi’ite mosque inside Iraq yesterday?

With the prospect of the chaos in Syria slopping over into
Iraq and endangering Maliki’s pro-Iranian administration, I don’t think Saudi
Arabia is going to be too interested in putting the brakes on Syria’s headlong
rush into collapse.

N.B. In the past I shrank from using the earthy metaphor “even
a blind hog finds a truffle once in awhile” since it didn’t seem to make any
sense.Pigs, after all, are employed
because of their ability to detect truffles underground by smell.Sight has nothing to do with it.However, TIL that truffles rely on mammals
detecting them, eating them, and defecating them in order to spread and
reproduce.Therefore, evolution (or the
Creator, exercising His/Her/Its prerogative of making everything as bizarre and
complicated as possible) selected truffles that emitted smells attractive to
animals.Specifically, the truffles
valued by gourmets emit an odor analogous to that of the male pig a.k.a. hog
sex pheromone, making them an object of interest and pursuit for female pigs
a.k.a. sows.That is why truffle pigs
are sows.A blind hog (at least one of
heterosexual bent) would be doubly disadvantaged in the search for truffles and
it would be proper to describe him as uniquely fortunate if he were able to
stumble upon one.

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